Really Simple Syndication with RSS

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RSS is a standard for syndicating content. If you’re not familiar with RSS, What is RSS? is a great new introductory article by Mark Pilgrim.

RSS is used mostly for articles on news and journal websites, but it’s not just for that. As Mark writes:

Pretty much anything that can be broken down into discrete items can be syndicated via RSS: the ‘recent changes’ page of a wiki, a changelog of CVS checkins, even the revision history of a book. Once information about each item is in RSS format, an RSS-aware program can check the feed for changes and react to the changes in an appropriate way.

Of course, audio/visual digital media can be syndicated with RSS as well.

One kind of RSS-aware program you should have is an RSS news reader. These applications let you subscribe to lots of RSS feeds so that you can (for example) see at a glance whether there are new entries at a site, and then easily view those entries. They’ll change the way you use the web, I promise.

PlaybackTime has always used RSS. With smart news readers, you can just point them to PlaybackTime’s URL to subscribe. (You may have to point stupid news readers to the exact URL of PlaybackTime’s RSS feed.) On Mac OS, NetNewsWire is the obvious chock-full-of-Aqua-goodness choice (and NetNewsWire Lite is free). On Windows there are several choices (none which jump out at me as the overall best), including AmphetaDesk, FeedReader and Newz Crawler. | What is RSS? | Open Directory: RSS news readers